


Kopfschmerzen

by anotherstrangersweet



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF, Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, M/M, but not really, i wrote it after reading death in spring, im not sure what this is, mental illness but in an abstract sense, messy and basically more about flowers than people, true love but it’s kinda rushed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 09:22:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16194671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anotherstrangersweet/pseuds/anotherstrangersweet
Summary: Timmy nodded, “so it doesn’t hurt behind your eyes. Like a headache?”“No, why?”“Your eyes are so very sad. Sometimes, when I look at you, I feel as if I might drown in everything I don’t understand. Your reality is so unfathomable to me, but I can see it, there, in your eyes.”





	1. one.

**Author's Note:**

> hello! this is hardly edited so sorry. it’s a bit fast paced and weird but it’s me, so it’s got to be odd in at least one respect. obviously none of this ever happened—
> 
> i hope you enjoy!
> 
> (i wrote all the poetry which is why it’s so bad lol)

 

 

By the 3rd of April, the village was like a cluster of jewels nestled between the neat fields and the woods where the artists’ flowers grew, and I was reminded of how lovely the site of the newly painted houses were from atop my lonely hill. On the 1st the artists had gone to pick the flowers to make the paint for the houses and the buzz of the young adults who would come of age that year was in competition with that of the bees, who had started hovering around the opening blossoms that swamped our little valley yearly. 

 

The ceremony would take place at midday as it always had done, and the tailors had be preparing the ceremonial robes all of March; their newest employees likely blistering a little at the fingertips, but still giddy with the excitement of introducing a new set of adults into the community. Many of our merchants—and many of the visiting merchants—had said that there was nothing more beautiful in all the world, than the ceremony of coming of age. 

Dressed in their finery; the left-over flowers that artists had gathered in their hair; perfume scenting their wrists; raffia crowns on their heads; the newly-painted houses gleaming around them; the artists playing cheery music with whim and vigour; I really believed that, even if these merchants were wrong, it would be hard to remember anything as lovely in the moment, when the young men and women took their hands and danced with the butterflies who never failed to show. 

 

Ah, even I was invited to the ceremony. 

 

I was not a recluse, but I was considered odd amongst the villagers. Living upon my little hill, I had not the money to participate with the flamboyance of the others. I lacked, too, the nearly unwavering happiness that stained the air between the colourful houses; I lacked the full education of the pretty boys and girls who rode their horses down to the river  to learn at the school, where the artists lectured on the beauty of the world; where the merchants taught them of the far off places one really ought to see. 

 

I wasn’t hated, for no one really hated anything—except disease—but I was confusing to the villagers, who didn’t understand why I was so down. 

 

“I wouldn’t say sad,” Mrs. Kaluuya told me, when she came to get her horse shoed, “that is such a dull word. I would say melancholy.”

 

“Yes;” I replied, “ _Melancholia—_ that is what the doctors said. But I am not always so moody!” I chuckled, patting her horses neck affectionately. 

 

Melancholia was, of course, considered a disease, so it was silently agreed upon that I would not live in the village, in case I gave it to someone else. I was not shunned by any means, for no one was terrible to me, but there was always a feeling of unease when I spent too much time in town. So, because the doctors had prescribed that loneliness made me more sick, and therefore I had to have some amount of social interaction each day, the village had drawn me up a timetable. 

 

I was aloud three hours in town, everyday: the only exceptions were for ceremonies and festivals. I wasn’t permitted to village meetings or school, and I had been declared unfit for work. Then, when the care packages they’d been providing me with, started to be considered cruel, as I was left with no money for amenities and to spend in town, the village had allowed me part-time work as the farrier. 

 

So, I didn’t have colourful clothes and my house remind bare all year round, but I was content. I had no real friends, except for the acquaintance I had in Mrs. Kaluuya and her son, Daniel,  but the bees still liked my flowers and men tipped their hats to me in the street, so I couldn’t complain. 

 

-

 

At quarter past eleven, I made my way down to the village; the yellow rose Mrs. Kaluuya had sent me for the festivities tucked into my suit-jacket pocket, and my horse wearing daises in her mane. I thought, even though the thought was very small and quiet, that we might look shabby next to the others, but I felt as if we were a part of them; colour sweeping forth from my breast pocket and and mingling with the colour that burst forth from their entire existence. It was silly, but I envisioned one of the young men begging a dance from me, smiling and giggling when I accepted; I imagined him telling me I was handsome with such a pretty flower adorning my clothes. I imagined him holding my shoulders like they sometimes do and I imagined my own hands gently cradling his little waist, as I had seen done before, and we would sway to some of the only music I would hear that year. 

 

But that was silly. I could not dance; I had never been taught by the artists for I had never been to school, and I hadn’t the money for a gramophone, so I couldn’t play music at home in order to teach myself, either. And no one had ever asked me to dance, for fear of infection. 

 

It would be enough to watch. 

 

-

 

The girls came out first, for it was understood that they were more mature than the boys, and they wore robes of vibrant silk and satin—dark oranges and deep blues and reds and bright pinks that fit each them uniquely. Their long hair was coloured with powder and the stars that fell from the sky each January had been harvested from the sand by the far off sea and woven across their raffia crowns. 

 

They spoke the first stanza of that years ceremonial verse like tears leak from the corner of the eye; with a watery secrecy that attached itself to my throat and squeezed and, as I did every year, I understood that this was another group of people that I would never know. These girls would bring me their horses, one by one, and once I had shoed them, they would pay me and go on, and wonder, innocent like everyone was in the village, how a man could bare to gaze upon a home that was so dull. 

 

The boys were dressed in fairer cloth and their crowns did not shine with stars, but with exotic amethyst and there was no colour in their hair, but across their eyelids and cheeks. They spoke the second stanza as if all hope was alight within their voices; as if no wonder in all the world was to escape their harmonious sound, and if I could dance, I would have danced then. 

 

-

 

“Can you read?” 

 

I placed Mr Chalamet’s horses hoof back onto the stone floor of my workshop and answered, surprised by such curiosity—

 

“Yes. And I can write and do a fair share of maths, too.” 

 

His clear green eyes regarded me with further intrigue and he shrugged; “huh.” he said. 

 

There was a pause as I began work on the next hoof. 

 

“Y’know, in school we like to dare each other to ask our parents if we can marry you after the coming of age ceremony. People hardly ever do it, because they hate to distress their parents, but my friend Saoirse did it once, and her mother almost cried apparently.”

 

I chuckled, and if one was taught to understand upset as one was taught to understand joy, then Mr. Chalamet would have understood that it was diluted by hurt. 

 

“Well, it must be quite a distressing thought; no one likes disease.”

 

“No.” he agreed, “but Daniel, Mrs. Kaluuya’s son, thinks us terrible when we joke about you. He says that if you’re weren’t so unwell, then all the village would want to marry you.”

 

“Daniel is being fanciful; no one would marry me.” 

 

“But you do wish to be married, do you not?” Mr. Chalamet looked at me as if he was trying to decipher the turmoil that had sickened my mind; his delicate cheeks pink from the sun.

 

“I would, yes. But it will never happen.” 

 

“Not until you are better.” he said in return, as if he were correcting me, and I shook my head because I was twenty-four and had been melancholic all my life. 

 

When I was done with his horse, he told me that, indeed, I was very handsome, even in my drab clothes and when he smiled, I smiled too, even though I hadn’t thought I wanted to. 

 

“Goodbye, Mr. Hammer. Have a wonderful evening.” the sky was purple when he took his horses bridle and tightened his girth, leaning up to kiss my cheek before he mounted and clipped out of the courtyard. 

 

-

 

In May, the meadows turned yellow and orange because of all the flowers, and the mountains turned pink—but the top was always white. 

 

When the birds flew back in from across the sea, I went into town to see their dance which happened, every year, above the fountain of our founders. I stood leaning against the little café at the corner of Cow Lane, where the market was put up in July—it had been painted yellow—and I smiled when the first bird appeared above the square. 

 

“Mr. Hammer?” 

 

I looked away from the sky and found Mr. Chalamet to be making his way over, dressed in royal blue and purple. His tie had been pinned with a little swallow, and I thought of what it might be like to have so much, that I could dress specifically for an occasion. 

 

“Hello, Mr. Chalamet.” I took his outstretched hand and kissed his knuckles, as was custom. 

 

He smiled as if he were about to giggle and said: “Please, Mr. Chalamet is my father, all my friends call me Timmy.”

 

“But we aren’t friends,” I pointed out, oddly charmed.

 

“Of course we are!” he exclaimed, aghast, and then I felt his hand push between my elbow and my body, so that he could link his arm with mine. 

 

“Now, let’s watch these birds; it happens only once a year, after all.” he said.

 

And we did. Together, for an hour. 

 

-

 

By the time the last of the birds had swept away to make their nests in the forest, Timmy was tugging me down Cow Lane, to the little bookshop on Primula Street, where flowers grew up between the cracks in the pavement and never died. 

 

The bookshop was at the top of a long line of shops, and was the only one in the village. It spammed three floors, which were narrow and older than the very founders themselves, and when the wind blew in strong from the West, where the sea wept and sang, the rickety building would sigh, shift and Mr. Picket, who has owned the shop for as long as I could remember, would say;

 

“She’ll last, boys, she’ll last.” 

 

That year, Mr. Picket had painted the bookshop a pale pink colour and the little balconies that hung from the lopsided windows were adorned with pots of red geraniums. 

 

Pausing outside the door, Timmy turned to me and asked, his pretty eyes hopeful;

 

“When is your curfew?” 

 

“Two hours,” I replied, and he nodded, taking me through the ground floor and straight up to the second, calling a greeting back to Mr. Picket, who had welcomed him with familiarity. 

 

Timmy ran his nimble fingers over the spines of some of the books, just to feel them, and fled to the third aisle, which had a little sign that read _poetry_. 

 

“Mr. Hammer, you must read this!”

 

He thrust a small volume into my hands and beamed up at me, brushing curls from his eyes, and fishing out a little brown bobby pin to keep them from coming back in waves; if his hair were an army coming in from some neighbouring land, then the clip was the front line. 

 

I was ashamed at finding it so endearing, and looked back at the book. 

 

“Why?” I inquired, eyeing the orange paperback with longing, for there was little else more wonderful in the world than to read. 

 

“Because the poems are so very sad, Mr. Hammer. I thought straightway of you when I bought it myself a couple of weeks ago, and I believe that it would be good for you to read something sad, so that you know that the artists feel those things too.” 

 

I was touched that he had thought of me; that he had found me—or what he believed to be me—between the pages of a book; a deepest treasure, but he was mistaken. 

 

“That is a different type of sad.” I said, my heart clenching behind my ribs, for there was nought more tender in my life than this boy, only now turned a man, who had spoken to me but twice and yet wondered after my health. 

 

I was reminded of the kindness of the villagers, and wished that I had not been born so defected. 

 

“But—but, you’ve not read it, how would you know?” he argued. 

 

“Because the artists do feel sad, yes, and perhaps to you it may seem that they feel some multitude far greater than what is understandable, but it is merely the sadness you would feel if your horse died. It seems amplified, for they draw on it more frequently, but it is not the same sadness as mine.” 

 

“I think you’re wrong. I’ve never felt the way this man writes—“

 

Timmy seemed so sincere; it was like watching the dawning of a new day, for here the days began only when the sun sang and if she did not, then the night would stretch out; crying, always, always, and when the night was about to rip in two, the sun would rise and say _‘are you sincere?’_ and the night would only nod. 

 

“Alright.” I conceded, “but I don’t think that I can afford this. Let’s try the library.” 

 

“No,” Timmy shook his head, “I’ll buy it for you.”

 

“Tim.” I sounded fond but also aggravated—I had never sounded like that, I had never needed to. And _Tim_ ; it seemed intimate because he blushed, like the colour of the bookshop, and said _I’m buying this for you, that’s final._

I didn’t think it then, but this was the beginning of the end.

 

-

 

He took me to the willow by the kink in the narrow river that ran along the northern outskirt of the village. At this time of year, the families had taken to the grassy knoll awhile away, and we would be undisturbed. 

 

Leaning against the tree, Timmy removed his coat and set it down to sit upon: “Read to me,” he said, as I lay down beside him, overwhelmed by his company and blind, “then I’ll walk you home.”

 

“You don’t need to do that, it’s rather out of the way.” I said.

 

“Mr. Hammer, one doesn’t always have to _need_ to do the things that one does. Sometimes, one just does things because one wishes to, and that’s fine.” 

 

I read to him the first poem. It was called _This High Hill._

It went:

 

( _Let us pretend that we are all strangers to joy;_

_Think what lives you would lead if that were so._ )

_I cross the bridge where the stars sleep,_

_and wonder if anyone can hear my feet upon the floor below,_

_between the little lanes of the village_

_where my shadow still walks, dutifully._

_Man seems so small a thing_

_from this high hill._

_And if I were to look upon him again,_

_I would think that he seems ill_

_-fitted to the bed in which he sleeps._

_Blanket yourself in euphoria;_

_cover your eyes with the beauty of the wild, wonderful world_

_and you will have lived half a life._

_Ah, but what a life that halfness is!_

_To look upon a flower and to see its creation and its existence_

_and to forget that, as each second you look upon it ticks across this heavy sky,_

_it is brought closer to death than when you first gazed down._

_That you are, too._

-

 

Timmy told me that we should only read one at a time, because they were so sad and he didn’t think he could cope with such a heavy mood. 

 

Instead, we talked and watched the summer sky turn from one colour to the next, as it was want to do. On particularly warm days, one could close one’s eyes for, perhaps, five minutes, and when one re-opened them, the sky would have turned from lilac into yellow. On that day, it was slower to change. 

 

“What do you do?” I asked, looking up at Timmy’s face from where I lay. With a dandelion pressed between his lips, he replied:

 

“I make films.” 

 

I sat up, “you’re an artist?” I asked. I had never met one; they found me alien, or so the doctors had pledged. 

 

Timmy chuckled, he looked pleased. “In training,” he corrected, taking the dandelion from his mouth and fiddling with it between his fingers instead. 

 

“I’ve never met one.” I confessed, and I thought our sudden friendship could not withstand such a blow—he would think me too uneducated and provincial. 

 

“Well, they’re missing out. The lot of them.” was all he said. 

 

In that moment, I wanted desperately to touch him just so that I could understand the feeling of someone else’s skin beneath my fingers. But that was wrong; I wanted to understand the feeling of him, only. How soft would he be? How wound his undiseased body be different from mine? 

 

Looking at him, he seemed to be debating something and then, he shifted a little closer to me and touched my knee, “does it hurt?” he asked. 

 

Taken aback, I shook my head. 

 

“Really?” Timmy seemed disbelieving. 

 

“Well, it doesn’t hurt in the same way a broken bone or a scraped knee might, so if that’s what you’re thinking than no. It doesn’t hurt. But it can be painful in a more abstract sense.” 

 

Timmy nodded, “so it doesn’t hurt behind your eyes. Like a headache?” 

 

“No, why?” 

 

“Your eyes are so very sad. Sometimes, when I look at you, I feel as if I might drown in everything I don’t understand. Your reality is so unfathomable to me, but I can see it, there, in your eyes.” 

 

I suddenly felt very self-conscious and replied with only a simple “Oh”, looking away from Timmy and pushing my fingers through the grass to the side of my thigh. 

 

“This is why it’s advised that no one spend any more time with me than necessary. This is how you get ill, Timmy. I don’t want to infect you, I should go.”

 

I stood and paused, nodding curtly, before I turned to go—I felt, so suddenly, that I was about to weep and was mortified that someone so young could reduce me so quickly, so harmlessly, to such a state. 

 

“Please, Mr. Hammer, wait! I’m sorry if I offended you—Mr. Hammer, look, there’s no need to be—just wait, please!” 

 

I would not turn around; I strode as quickly as I could from him, embarrassed and concerned and guilt ridden all at once but then I felt a hand upon my shoulder and Timmy said, exasperated;

 

“ _Armie!_ ” 

 

I was shocked for no one had called me by my first name since my mother had passed.

 

“Look, I’m sorry. Let’s just begin again; move on—I’ll walk you home and we can talk about something else.” He waved his hand as if it were no big deal. 

 

Timmy looked at me, cautious and a little nervous, I was sure, but then I nodded and he smiled so brightly, I thought that perhaps the night would not need to wait for the sun to sing anymore. 

 

-

 

 

“What’s your favourite colour?” he asked, as we walked back through the village and up my hill, which, at that time of year, was covered in bluebells. 

 

“Green.” I replied, and later, when I was getting ready for bed, I thought of how Timmy’s eyes were green and knew that it was not a coincidence. 


	2. two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this is so short. hope you enjoy!

“Take me dancing?”

 

That July was similar to the feeling of blunt fingertips pressing persistently against my eyes. The days were long and the nights were short; they did not stretch out but stayed plump and purple like a plum, for morning came to life with a happy hum so loud, so long, that the soprano song of the birds exhausted itself by noon. 

 

Lazily slouching by the river, our underwear drying off (before, as Timmy had stepped out of the water, I had blushed furiously pink at the sight of him so perfectly outlined by the damp white cloth) in the evening sun, as the afternoon left us to the eve, I held my breathe and said, for the first time;

 

“I can’t. Sorry.” 

 

Timmy smiled; “why ever not?”

 

I turned to him, to see his pretty profile, to imagine his skin under mine, and softly replied;

 

“I’m not allowed to go to the dance hall. Orders from on high!” He didn’t chuckle at my joke, nor did he turn to me, and I felt the disappointment in his bones as if it were in mine, too. Perhaps it was. 

 

“Do you mind if I go, then—tonight.”

 

“Of course I don’t mind, Timmy, don’t be silly.” But I felt a sudden shame creep into my body and nestle in between my cells; if I wasn’t so damned, then we could dance in the hall, sweaty and out of breath, like all the young things do, and the life he leads when I am gone, could become ours—he would not have to be so restricted when around me. I was, I now realised, somewhat of a burden. If not heavy and exhausting, than a little anti-climactic, for I was sure he’d thought I’d be more interesting.

 

-

 

The flowers on my hill laughed at me, like a chorus of school children, as I waited for Timmy to appear on the horizon. The day was hot: delicate desire burned in my stomach, a residual fever from earlier in the morning, and I huffed out a long breath as I excepted that Timmy wasn’t coming. The orange book of poems he had bought me was flattening grass to my left and I opened it to page seventeen, which was Timmy’s favourite, just to feel his absence more terribly, for such was the nature of my condition to crave misery. 

 

The poem went:

 

_A sigh of passion leaves the breast of bees_

_when the cornflowers litter my fields_

_and watching clumps of clouds float by,_

_I see not creatures nor countries,_

_but colours and hope and you:_

_that sizzling joy when you are near_

_that I have know_

_perhaps a month._

_And now, in the hot and sultry day—_

_seducing all these butterflies—_

_love reminds me not to follow you_

_to the cliff_

_that shouted your name out to the whales,_

_who sang it back_

_and collected your budding soul._

 

_-_

On the second day of his radio-silence, it was apparent to me that the _melancholia_  had raised its toxic head from the gooey depths of my being and declared war on my unstable and recently acquired tranquility. 

 

What a strange comfort it was, too. 

 

It whispered, as if some detached voice that sounded just like my own, with words that seemed to sober my infatuation. I was ghastly; numb and forgettable and this deep, treacherous feeling crept up from my gut and stilled, smelling almost sweetly of roses, in my nose and in my mouth, and it told me that I was nothing. And this knowledge, which had carved me first at birth and would carve me once more at death, was not sad but real. There was this sense of satisfaction; of belonging. This was me: dull around the edges and persistently the same; sick and alien and worthless. I could not dance; and this little pebble, this kink, was the very flaw which tripped me up—picture a girl, laughing and playing with her skipping rope; what joy lives within her little face, is almost something tangible, and when she falls and blood runs down her knee, all that goes and the day is ruined and I, who breaks just as easily as a child, know only that I cannot bring even a finger to life. To wake and face the world, which was designed for others and not for me, is too much to bare; to conceive, and all I need is to lie awhile and wonder of other things—if life can be so postponed, that death thinks that you are already at its door, than one has perhaps not committed anything and cannot be damned further.  

 

-

 

It had been a week when I ventured back into the village. I had an appointment with the doctors to check on my progress—or, really, it was to see if I had kept up with all the rules they had placed. I liked the doctors, though they didn’t seem to care about me anymore, but about the others in regard to me, for they tried their best and always with good intentions. So I went and smiled and remarked upon the day, which was oddly purple for July, and they joked back that perhaps it had caught _melancholia,_ too! 

 

I told them about my week; how terribly depressed I’d been. 

 

“But what of your friend?” they asked, frowning.

 

“He’s been a little out of touch, but I don’t blame him. I think my way of life was getting to be too much.” 

 

They nodded; said that it was very removed from they way people lived in the village. 

 

Afterwards, when they had declared me unchanged, I stepped into the square, tugging on my coat sleeves, and I heard him across from me, giggling by the fountain. 

 

Timmy looked especially nice in a pink shirt and pin-striped trousers; his beautiful hair pined up underneath a hat I hadn’t seen him wear before and I smiled, despite the stillness of my soul, and the part of ourselves that was somehow sewn together must’ve ached within him for he looked up and straight at me—his face split in two with a smile and I was reminded of the milky way. 

 

“Armie!” he called, striding over.

 

“Hello, Mr. Chalamet—“ I stopped abruptly; I didn’t know what had made me say it, perhaps I was trying to put a little space between us, but I felt terrible as Timmy’s face fell and he whispered, rather dejectedly;

 

“Don’t. Don’t do that.” 

 

“I’m sorry.” I returned, moving closer to him so that I could wrap my arms around his boney shoulders. 

 

In return, Timmy squeezed my waist and playful head butted my chin as he tried to nuzzle his face into my neck, “come and meet my friends?” he asked, a little tentatively.

 

“Alright.” I acquiesced, pulling him closer to me before letting him go. 

 

Timmy lead me over to the fountain where two girls sat; one with short, dark red hair and the other blonde. They were sitting close; thighs pressed together, knees pressed together, shoulders to elbows to forearms pressed together, and they were giggling about something as Timmy and I approached. 

 

The fountain spat at me a little as they looked up and I felt a strong sense of comfort in the hand that I hadn’t noticed was holding mine; had been holding mine for awhile, now. 

 

“Armie,” Timmy began, “this is Saoirse and this is Greta. Ladies, this is Armie.” 

 

Greta stood first and I kissed her knuckles; I noticed that she had painted her nails an electric blue. 

 

As Saoirse stood, I wondered if she found me as excitingly outrageous as she had done when she played her parents and told them we were getting married, or if now she only thought me glum and subdued. 

 

“It’s nice to meet you, Armie,” she said, and her voice was unlike the others in the village; it made me smile and I nodded;

 

“Likewise.”

 

-

 

“She’s famous for her pink lemonade!” Timmy explained, passing me a glass. I thought it probably best if I didn’t tell him I’d never tried lemonade, let alone pink lemonade, when he asked if I thought it was good. I had nothing to compare it to, but it was nice.

 

We spent the afternoon at Greta’s; she had a nice place, airy and light and Timmy told me that they had met at the House of Higher Education; that Greta was an artist, too, that so was Saoirse. I felt a little stilted and out of place: here, amongst three highly educated people, for whom life was wrought of pretty fashions, decor and happiness, I was but a little patch of grey. 

 

They were kind, though. I liked them.

 

“Armie,” Saoirse started, “Timmy tells us that you like poetry.” 

 

Blushing, I nodded “I do.” 

 

Perhaps because he was proud of me, or because he had begun to notice now removed I was from him and his friends, Timmy said “he writes a little, too.” 

 

I did, but I felt only embarrassment at his declaration—I was self taught and abominable, my poetry was nothing and they would, if they ever read it, find me more dull than my house, which for them was the threshold. 

 

Greta smiled at me; “You should petition the House for a place there. Poetry is in dire need of more students this year; I’m sure they’d feel obliged, if nothing else,” she said. 

 

“Ah, I’m not actually allowed in any educational site; fear of infection, you see.” I reminded them, and Timmy placed his hand on my nape, his roaming fingers told me he was sorry for bringing it up. 

 

“Really? That can’t be right. Timmy’s spent so long in your company and he isn’t the least bit poorly!” Saoirse’s empathy was sweet, if futile.

 

Shrugging, I explained that it was alright, really, I was used to the world not making sense to me.

 

“All the village is one way,” I explained, “and I am in direct opposition to that. If you be crops, than I’m crown gall disease.” 

 

Beside me, Timmy scoffed and tugged a little harsher on my hair, “you’re not crown gall disease, Armie.” turning to the others, he said “perhaps we ought to be calling it night. Armie’s technically not meant to be in the village for this long, anyway.” 

 

Looking outside, the sky had turned a soft scarlet, accented by soft orange clouds, and I wanted desperately to understand something so harmonious; to become it, to finally be calm. 

 

-

 

Timmy walked me home and then he paused, took his shoes off at the door, and followed me inside. 

 

“Can I stay the night?” 

 

“Of course.” I couldn’t believe I’d been so bold as to say yes.

 

Timmy walked into my bedroom, unbuttoned his trousers and slide them off;

 

“Can we talk?” he asked, folding his trousers across the footboard of my bed. 

 

“About?” I moved to undo his shirt and Timmy let me, staring up at me with something I had never felt before. This confidence of mine was unsettling, but I carried on. 

 

“I’m sorry about last week. It wasn’t very kind of me, I know.” 

 

“Don’t worry, it was bound to happen eventually. It’s alright, now, isn’t it?”

 

Timmy stilled my hands; “it shouldn’t’ve happened.” 

 

Pausing in the dusk, Timmy held my face in his hands and whispered:

 

“You are the best person I’ve ever known. The best version of humanity lies in you.”

 

I wanted to cry, but he was crying and it felt more important to cure him of whatever sorrow fed his soul, so I kissed his head and told him;

 

“If I’m the best of humanity, than you are the best of everything else that exists in this world; all the flowers, all the beasts, all the tiny, golden stars.”

 

I thought of the jug of flowers that had wilted the first day he’d not come to see me, and I feared, as if nothing else in the world was salient, that he might wilt, too, so I held him closer and at night, as we slept, I held him closer still. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes, Greta has her 20th Century Women hair and no, I have no idea where the idea of her being good at making pink lemonade came from...


	3. three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ok, sorry it's been so long since I last updated. the number of times I've tried to rewrite this is insane and I still hate it so yeah, enjoy? everything’s a bit rushed in this chapter and the quality leaves a lot to be desired, to say the least. 
> 
> also, there's mention of self-harm in this chapter. it's not graphic at all and is only very brief, but here's a warning just in case.
> 
> last thing, the poem in this is basically just an example of something A wrote. it’s not really like, a part of the plot. though it does showcase A’s feelings for T.

The first time we kissed, we had been sitting beneath the orange tree by my stable, wrapped in two blankets, watching the sky bleed fire: the first of the stars falling to the beaches, where they would cool and by January, down to the shore we’d go, baskets in hand, and collect our favourites.

It had been impromptu—he’d turned towards me, slid his hand into my hair and leant in, and for all my exceptions, I hadn’t thought it to be so wet. But it was lovely, too.  
He pulled away after a moment and smiled, giddy like, and if later, we kissed again, soft and then hungry, and then soft again, it was merely because stopping now that we had begun seemed an inconceivable notion: by the time the sun rose, tangerine and apricot in the morning, he was almost naked under me and I found that the fit of my hand around his thigh was almost more erotic than his erection pressing against my hip.

-

I should have know that the bliss that fell over the end of November was not to last: as Timmy’s obligations to the Guild of Artists became more pressing and his studies intensified, I began to retreat behind the doors in my mind that had only been ajar since April, but now were flung wide open, and the vast nothingness that had been kept at bay, slipped silently over the thresholds of these doors and stained my blood with sorrow.

Upon the penultimate day of the month, I began to notice the dirt under my nails and the constant twist in the centre of chest: it felt like someone was wringing out a wet flannel, about wipe black dust from the top of their bureau—I wanted to flip a switch and be done with it, but I could not. And the burning desire to be something other than what I was, outshined all other pressing, fixable matters until I crumbled underneath their unseen weight and drove a nail partway into my palm.

“What have you done?” Timmy sounded almost more accusatory than worried, as he came through my door that same afternoon and saw me wrapping up my hand.

“Cut myself.” was the most I could supply.

“On purpose?” he asked, and I realised it was fear rather than accusation.

I nodded, though it was only half true; “I didn’t plan it, nor think about doing it, but once it was done I knew that I had wanted to. It wasn’t an accident.”

Timmy shifted, pulled his lower lip under his upper and then sighed, like a wave upon the shoreline: “what’s brought this on, then?”

I told him I wasn’t sure; that maybe I had been happy too long and the universe, which was habitual more than most seemed to be aware of, was jarred and took immediate action—“this is a product of such a seamless summer.”

“Seamless?” Timmy wasn’t convinced. Though, he had not known me the summer before when I cut my thigh and nearly bled to death. Had not known me at my worst, for I was afraid that if he did, he would cease to whisper into my skin that he loved me; that he would marry me if I wanted. I was afraid he would find me grotesque.

And so, from the end of November until mid-December, a darkness fell over the house.

On the days I woke before three and moved around, I spent the nights lying in the freshly fallen snow, unable to admit to myself what it was I was wishing for, until Timmy came and lay beside me, and after only a minute, I picked him up and carried him inside and he would hold me as I cried. He would hold me as I wept and as I lay stoic and silent and even as I raged against his comfort; there was nothing in him that faltered and I knew, that this calm was for me.

On the final day of my furious depression, I broke my hand.

It had been inevitable, for I always ended my bouts of excruciating pain with something dramatic; something to put it at ease for a few months, docile but there, until it reared it’s head and jumped down my throat.

I had woken with a headache behind my eyes, lingering from the night before, and Timmy’s side of the bed was cold. Trembling in the noontime air, but still managing to drag myself to the kitchen to put the kettle on, I noticed that upon the kitchen table, a vase sat with a cluster of dead paper-white narcissus falling around the sides. I had felt the strongest sense of loneliness and despair, looking on them, and I reached out to change them to something alive, but the vase slipped from my hand and smashed against the floor. The tiny shards of glass, scattered so carelessly over the tiles, was like a punch in the trachea and I was angry, all of a sudden; desperate and confused and longing for something to feel like it had done, something other than this abysmal black that knitted its fingers through my own. So, I punched the wall above the sink, and rejoiced in the cry that left my lips; on the blood colouring my knuckles; on the sensation, such violence had caused.

And afterwards, when I was discharged by the doctors, Timmy shouted at me; told me that I was reckless and unthinking—

“What if you decided that breaking your hand wasn’t enough?” he said, “what if you —“ he stopped, stared at me as if I’d hallowed out his soul and stuffed it full of poisonous mushrooms.

“What if I what?

Timmy’s voice was like a harp; sad and delicate and full of fear: “What if you had died.” he whispered, coming to the end of his fuse and I realised, succumbing to the more rational part of my mind, that I was no longer alone. Timmy was here for me and if I continued on in the way I had been, I would hurt him and when the hurting became too much, he would surely leave.

The notion of which was as crushing as the summer heat and I knelt at his feet and kissed his hips, his hands and loved, with words like a cello suite, “you will not lose me”.

-

By January, and on the day we went down to the beaches to collect our stars, which sat against the sand as if giant pearls, we were met with the first difficulty.

The head of the Artists Guild, a short, oblivious man called Stephen Bishop, came to me with the sickening news that if I were to continue on in my inappropriate affair with Timmy, he would call it the attention of the boy's parents—

“You know very well that they would not approve. It would worry them,” he said, feigning indifference in the hopes that he didn’t seem unneighbourly.

“I believe they know,” I said in return, watching from the corner of my eye Dr Harris who had been overlooking all my appointments since December when I had broken down so fitfully.

Bishop started a little; “and they do not worry?” he was incredulous.

“About what?” I asked; though it was really more of a challenge than a query.

“That you’ll get Timothée sick, of course.”

I wanted to scoff but instead, I pulled my lips into a line and said, most agreeably, “with all the time we’ve spent together since April, you would think that he would have caught melancholia by now. Perhaps,” and this I said with great caution, “it isn’t contagious.”

Since I was seven, hands sticky from jam on toast and knees brown with dusty dirt in July, my mother had known that I was wrong. Then, it had been accepted that I was the odd child belonging to the family from far off south, where a great fire had been raging for five months, and that if I were peculiar more often than not, well, that was purely because I had hailed from some other place where perhaps my behaviour was perfectly ordinary. My mother, though, who had never loved me as much as one would think mothers ought to love their children, was convinced that I was sick. If we had been anywhere else, then I would have merely been proclaimed sad, but here, where tulips spoke in whispers about the meaning of their succinct deaths and the birds danced rather than flew; where people were happy except for when it made sense for them not to be, and nothing was inexplicable, sickness was the most afeared off all the wonders of the universe. Here, sickness was closer to hell than death and at once, when my mother sighed one grey afternoon that ‘something is terribly wrong with my boy; I think he is unwell’ the doctors had taken me from her, and kept me in a room alone, testing me and I had known, from the moment she was reported dead five weeks later, that I would not have seen her anyway, even if she had lived to see the doctor’s outcome.

I had been thought of as a risk for seventeen years and the mere notion that I was not, well, it hadn’t crossed the minds of experts, so it certainly would seem unfathomable to anyone else.

“Not contagious?” he said, eyes darting from my face to the people over my shoulder, as if they would proclaim him unwell too, just by uttering the words.

“Perhaps not,”

Bishop was incredulous; his face was purple and his eyes were grey and the confidence that I had built, seething and unused for the better half of twenty years, leapt up from depths previously unexplored and left him standing there, trying to understand what it was that I had said. But as I walked away, I found myself to be completely drained; never had I spoken up about my health before to someone other than Timmy and, on one occasion not too long ago, to Greta and Saoirse as we went over for afternoon tea; a luxury I had not previously known until my steady integration into Timmy’s life outside the confines of my former near-reclusiveness.

I was afraid that when Bishop told Dr Harris what I had said, there would be disastrous repercussions. I had been right to be so afraid.

-

“You’re not to spend any more time with him, Mr Hammer,” Dr Harris said, her brown eyes suddenly cold so that looking at her made me shiver.

“But—“

“No. Don’t argue. I hate to do this, Mr Hammer, for it is not the right of anyone to get in between two people who are in love, and if this were about any two other people, there would be no question of my congratulating you on your finding your other half, but after consulting for days now, a decision has been made.”

“Mr Chalamet’s health cannot be compromised by your lackadaisical attitude towards your condition. We feel it would be too much strain on his poor family: imagine that, Mr Hammer, your own child sleeping with someone who might cause them harm? We have always believed melancholia to be spread by overexposure and if one is being as intimate as sharing a bed with another, then there is no question of their overexposure. Do you see why we must separate you, now, Mr Hammer?”

“And if we do not do as you have asked?”

Dr Harris smiled, sympathetically and yet with some measure of sterile irritation, “Then Mr Chalamet will be made to give up his place at the House and in the Artists Guild, too. Harsh, I know, and it would be a shame for he is very well accomplished, but we feel that if the consequences aren’t harsh, then what would be the point of all this? You would surely just ignore us.”

She paused, leant back in her forest green chair as if trying to exude some extra level of power and intimidation.  
“So, I ask again: do you see why we must separate you, Mr Hammer?” she said.

I nodded, though I disagreed. “I do.”

“Well then, let’s have no more fuss. I’m sure, once enough time has passed and Mr Chalamet has moved forward from such rebellious infatuation that the two of you can perhaps be friends again.”

I was upset by her nonchalance; by her piss-poor attempt at trying to console me. This lack of care for another’s suffering was not common among the villagers but I knew, in the recess of my mangled mind, that I did not register as one of them on their radars. I was some sort of hybrid: born elsewhere but raised here and most shockingly, perpetually unwell.

“Perhaps,” I replied, “good day.”

I realised, as I left her office and trotted down the stairs, that she had not offered her hand to me in greeting, that neither had Bishop and somewhere ugly and cold, my paranoia woke and screamed they’re trying to get rid of you!

-

Timmy was standing by the fountain outside the doctors as I closed the door behind me; he was cold, I could tell, and when he spotted me coming across the square, he called out:

“Armie!”

I stopped and looked down at him: he had been crying.

“What did they say?” Timmy asked, pleading with me though I had not yet denied him anything.

“That we aren’t to see each other anymore. They can’t run the risk of you getting sick,”

“And what did you say to that?” his nose was red like he’d put blush all over the tip, and his eyes swam before me, threatening me with rain.

“That I would stay away. But you knew that.”

“I don’t care—“ his voice was louder now, angrier, “—I don’t care that they’ll kick me out of school or the Guild, Armie. I love you; I want to be with you.”

I wanted desperately to reply that I was the same; that I loved him and wanted to be with him, too, but I didn’t. Instead, I told him that that was no longer on the table; as if our affection for each other was a business offer.

“I’m sorry, Timmy. You could achieve so much, throughout all the world, and it would be a shame to waste such talent on—“

“It wouldn’t be a waste!” Timmy shouted, his fingers made a fist and I could see the whiteness of his palms were the nails dug in.

“No? Enlighten me please, because all I can think is that no matter how much you love me, after a while all that potential; all that skill and fervour would begin to grow untempered within you and you’ll get bored—I know it—you’ll get bored and resentful. And who could blame you? Just think about it, Timothée, helping me in the garden or stable? shoeing horses every now and then? would not that make you mad? Everyone’s got to make compromises, but that doesn’t mean you give up your career—your passion—for me. Let me be the compromise, Timmy. Just, let me give you this. Or rather, give this to yourself.”

If I was shadowed by sadness, then he was shadowed by despair and I could see that he was confused by the feeling; the twisting in the chest; the pain of feeling as if all the world is hopeless and within such hopelessness, one lies, a slave to the incessant twisting under the ribcage which isn't merely uncomfortable but pulls forward from the forgotten places in one's mind everything that makes one wish one couldn't think, because how could anyone stand the noise of grief; the noise of sorrow?

I could not. I suspected that he could not, either. And in that moment, which comes to me sometimes in dreams, for I was so afraid, I wondered if perhaps they had been right, and melancholia was contagious.

Timmy fell under the strain of his confusion, his eyes wide with a certain shock of unpleasant realisation, and against the whiteness of the newly fallen snow, he looked particularly vulnerable. Ignoring whatever cautionary restraint I had put in place after spotting Timmy by the fountain minutes earlier, I went to him, mindless of the cold and the wet, and embraced him:

”If this is how you feel, ” he said, ”how can you bare to wake in the morning?”

And beneath the sound of his laboured breathing and soft sobs, I heard him whisper: ”I don't want to feel this way, anymore.”

”I know, my love. I know. And I am sorry.” I replied, and if the world were to end right there, at that moment, I was quite sure that neither of us would have noticed, for we were in each other's arms for what we both had feared would be the last time.

-

 _You are beautiful. I think thee so,_  
and the whole world, waking in silence at this time of year,  
thinks so, too.  
And asleep upon my bed,  
you take from me everything.

 _I whimper at the dawning of this new day_  
and when it closes, I shake. For I cannot be,  
if you are not to curate my being.  
I will not live: what point would there be to live  
if all I have to offer is such  
emptiness?  
Could you, who slumbers like the tulip in your garden, as the April breeze rocks it gently,  
feed me whatever it is that nourishes you?  
I want such purpose,  
distilled and pure,  
to hover around me as if a glow.  
(You glow like the stars we watched falling just last night.)  
And if you cannot,  
Then will you watch me, gentle as you are,  
decay beneath the weight of my unnatural soul?  
Will you make me comfortable?

_I know you will._

_(It takes me, for whom this splendid hour is wretched,_  
a small moment between words,  
to come back to myself. Somehow,  
I am distracted by the way you suddenly stir;  
undress; take my eyes within the lock of your own and smile:  
why so weak? I think I might be brave enough to ask.  
I do not.  
The look of your skin entices—this you knew, this you exploited—  
and so I still, and let myself fall into whatever it is that you wish me to become.)

-

In the days and nights following our separation, I revisited my poetry with a new sense vigour and urgency; shutting myself away and going over each word until it sat right on the page, but even then I felt as if my writing was abysmal.  
I found that the poems that left me with the most satisfaction, were the ones I had written before, whilst Timmy had still been my lover; my dearest friend and now, as I watched the words swim before my heavy eyes, like mirages in the quivering heat of a desert horizon, I was struck with a new sort of pain.

It could not be tempered; it could not be reasoned with, and I felt as if everything, little or large, was mocking me, taunting me with visions of his face. And in dreams, rose-tinted and smooth-edged, we were together, sometimes only to talk about small, insignificant things. Sometimes more.  
Waking to the bleakness of the world after such dreams, was not only devastating but made me physically sick, too, and my tongue would be rough and white and my head would pound; screaming like a banshee—what it screamed, I could not tell, though it seemed to deafen me.

As January slipped into February, with the gradual cooling of the stars I kept under my kitchen sink, things began to change.

The indigo shadows hid in the corners of the streets and between houses, reminding us that the yesterdays of last year were not merely gone, but unreachable, too, and with this shift, I had also noticed that the villagers treated me with an added level of sympathy; that they'd tread around me with care, not only for their health but for mine, too.

I wasn't sure how they'd found out about what had happened between Timmy and I but I knew that it had not been the doing of Dr Harris nor Stephen Bishop. Meddling such as theirs was uncommon and what people were unfamiliar with, they tended to be unsettled by. But they had found out and I began to receive letters from near strangers, expressing their sorrow. If there was one thing the people of the village could be relied upon to do, it was to seek out love and root for it.

And so, February passed as well, and although I felt the weight of my disposition more now than I had in a while, I lacked the courage to do anything so bold as to speak up, as I had done on the beach. Timmy was gone and with him, my courage.  
I was returned to my former self—

—and then it happened.  
Across the monument to our founders in the central square, the motto: joy is found when man ceases to look for it but lets it come to him, was crossed out and underneath, it had been rephrased. It said:  
Compassion is dead when one man finds joy and lets those without remain so.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading and again, apologies for the crappy quality.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! leave kudos and/or a comment if ya like!


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